Language development : Form and function in emerging

The present paper was first published 25 years ago, having appeared in 1982 in The Structure of Phonological Representations, edited by H. van der Hulst and N. Smith, now out of print. Why do we consider it worthwhile to republish it? Because, as we all know, articles in books are not read as much as articles in journals, and we think that this paper contains some ideas (later expanded in Nespor – Vogel [1986], to be republished in 2007) that still inspire work that is being carried out today. One area in which work has continued regards the Phonological Phrase. In particular, much work has followed from claims about the structure of this domain and relative prominence within it, as well as the relation between this domain and the distinction between right and left branching languages. With the exception of one Chinese dialect in which, apparently our generalization does not hold (Selkirk – Shen [1990]), no counterexamples have been proposed in any of the languages examined in the framework of Prosodic Phonology (various papers by The different phonology reflecting word order in syntax has thus been proposed to be of crucial importance for the acquisition of word order in infancy. If in fact word order could be acquired through prosody, its acquisition may happen before infants have segmented the speech stream and discovered the meaning of words. This would account for the fact that when, at around 20 months of age, children start combining two words, they do not make mistakes in it is proposed that word order could be acquired on the basis of the location of prominence within Phonological phrases. In Christophe – Nespor – Guasti – van Ooyen (2003), it is shown that 6-12 weeks old infants discriminate Turkish (head final) from French (head initial) solely on the basis of prosody. Hofmann – Höhle –Weissenborn (2003) show that 14-month-old infants, prefer head final to head initial structures, reflecting their first productions. Bion – Höhle – Schmitz (submitted) propose that 14-month-old infants discriminate verb-noun from noun-verb sequences on the basis of both prosody and morphological markers. Another area that has continued to receive a great deal of attention is the nature of the Intonational Phrase. Much attention has been devoted to the nature of the relationship between syntax/semantics and prosodic structure (cf. Croft [1995]). While the Intonational Phrase was originally proposed in the present work as a domain …